Inaugural Monthly Update

For some reason I have decided to try to post something every month. Maybe it’s to improve my writing skills, or so I don’t feel like I’m wasting money on this domain, or because I like embarrassing myself. Who knows? I don’t expect (or even particularly want) anyone to read this, but I like the idea of journaling so I can look back and remember what I was up to at any given time. Even if it’s just for me, I feel like posting publicly somehow holds me accountable and might increase the odds that I stick with it. We’ll see!

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on audio in one way or another. On the creative side, I find it very satisfying just to mess around in a DAW, sometimes trying to arrange something that at least resembles music, other times just playing with a synthesizer to see what weird sounds I can get out of it. Cardinal has been especially fun for this, and it’s easy to lose track of time plugging modules into each other and seeing what happens.

On the more technical side, I’ve been (re)learning SuperCollider, Pure Data (in the form of plugdata), and a little bit of strudel. Writing your own synths and effects provides even more of an opportunity to produce horrible interesting sounds, and strudel’s pattern language, which originated in Tidal Cycles, is a really cool way to describe rhythms and melodies.

On the even more techincal side (that’s right, there are three sides), I’ve been reading Julius Smith’s excellent online textbooks. I read some of Introduction to Digital Filters years ago and learned a lot, but definitely moved too fast before having a good enough grasp of the fundamentals. I’m now making the same mistake again with Physical Audio Signal Processing, BUT at the same time I’m working through Mathematics of the Discrete Fourier Transform much more carefully. I’ve also ordered a cheap used copy of Oppenheim and Schafer’s Discrete-Time Signal Processing. Maybe that will give me something better than doomscrolling to do before bed.